User talk:Eric Hunting
Welcome Welcome to Wikia--Kirk 23:55, 16 April 2007 (UTC) Logo Hi Eric Hunting. Thanks for on this wiki. Did you know that you can change the logo for this wiki by a .png file called Wiki.png? Let me know if you need any help with that. Angela talk 02:07, 1 June 2007 (UTC) Hi Eric, I'm impressed about all this ideas that you put into the wikia. I have also some but I must order them at first. I discovered this group only by chance. Unfortunately you can't meet everday somebody who ist intreresten in galaxy colonizing. I'm living now in Germany and I'm not native spraker in english, so this all could take awhile. However galactiv colonization in this rhythm till now may take tousands of years anyway. Hi Eric i realy enjoyed reading your wiki on TMP. would you know how long it would take to finish all the different elements of the wiki? i cannot wait until it is finished, as i realy would like to read about the rest of the steps. would you know how i could get hold of a copy of the original book, or a revised copy of the book, as i am finding it difficult to find a copy in the library system. yours sincerely, --Hannah Collins 08:40, 16 August 2009 (UTC) Earth Shelters Eric, I stumbled into your site "The Promise and Myth of Dirt Cheap Housing" when I was researching a cheap way to build a sound barrier wall for my yard (Santa Fe, NM). I was fascinated and excited by what I read and was very curious to hear the outcome of your own search for a suitable method. Like you, I have some concerns about the of do-it-yourself labor aspect. You don't reveal your circumstances but I too cannot hope to attempt alone what I may have eagerly tried to do just a few years ago. I have long-considered cobb an ideal and aesthetically pleasing choice but I see from your article there are other, probably more practical solutions available. In the intervening years since you wrote this, has anything new and innovative appeared in the marketplace? When I eventually sell my house I expect to have enough equity to build a small house (for just me and some critters) and to contribute to its design/construction would be a dream realized. I have several ideas about the virtues of berming the structure (into rock/hillside) to minimize vertical construction, improve insulation, maximize Southern exposure, etc. I have thought a lot about this project, but I need technical support and maybe some friendly encouragement to forge ahead. My efforts will need to be very imaginative (for financial and aesthetic reasons) and conservative in scale. Have you written a book? Do you travel to give talks? Do you know of an organization I can join (locally or even nationally) that would provide the tech/psychological support I am seeking. After sending this off to you, I intend to continue my search. A response via this venue is a long-shot I realize but it would be an honor to hear from you personally. . . or from anyone else out there who is on the same path. thank you in advance for any guidance you can provide and thank you for that thoughtful and helpful article. ----Stella Reinwald my email is: biblionymph@gmail.com its been a long time since i last said hello maybe 10 years or so ago , are any of the old millennial project crew using twitter ? i have investigated it for a few months now and found it to be a very useful tool follow me at www.twitter/brettmashado.com it could be a good way to spread the ideas Ad free Hi! Would you like this wiki to be ad-free? I'm looking for wikis to be part of a new program which would remove all ads from the wiki for $19.95/month. If you are interested, please be visit here to sign up. if you have any questions! - sannse (help forum | blog) 21:18, June 3, 2010 (UTC) Formatting Hello Eric, I put together the following as a result of some discussion that occurred on the Luf-team discussion group. MediaWiki:Common.css - This is where global formatting changes can be made. Note that only those with administrative access can make changes to this file. At present you are the only one in the group that can muck with it. If the following could be added, this should answer most of the formatting issues that seem to exist. #bodyContent, #content, #footer { font-size:12px; background-color: #FFFF66; background-repeat: repeat; color: Black; } Hopefully, I picked a good color for the background. If not, other choices can be found at http://www.theodora.com/gif4/html_colors.gif --Kirk 04:55, July 10, 2010 (UTC) This doesn't seem to have worked well at all. After inserting it and clearing my browser caches to see the changes, I got quite a messed up display. The test frame background is a bad yellow color and the main text frame is set with it's upper corner too far up in the upper-left corner blocking side frames and edit buttons. I'll leave this change in for a day so you can see the results. I've added your style changes to the very end of the style sheet so they're easy to find. I'm not sure I understand what format issues people were talking about. I had no problem with the default setup before, which has a color set that nicely complimented the logo. Eric, The primary concerns were about the size of the text, and indenting. But several seemed to object to the white background as well. Unfortunately, my color sense has never been quite the same as others, so I'm not too surprised at your objection to the color choice. I'm actually okay with the white background as well. It might be that a bigger font would be enough, as that appears to be the biggest issue among those who were discussing it. As far as indenting is concerned, I've already created a separate workaround template that seems to do the job. Not sure what you mean about blocking the edit buttons as I am having no problem seeing and using them on my laptop.Kirk 00:22, July 11, 2010 (UTC) Viewing with a Safari browser, the format change caused the main text frame to move up and to the left, causing it to overlap the editing buttons and left column navigation buttons. Wikia doesn't use quite the same standards as straight web sites so some of the style sheet rendering may be different. Eric Hunting 02:45, July 11, 2010 (UTC) Hello Eric, I think I found where the problem lies. If I'm not mistaken, you are currently set up with the Monobook skin. When looking at the pages using Monobook myself, I came across the problem with buttons being blocked etc. Since we don't want to mess things up for Monobook users, it seems that we can't be messing with MediaWiki:Common.css. Cleaning up that mess should be as simple as deleting the page. I've been able to determine that the normal default is MediaWiki:Sapphire.css, so most of the people reading will be on that one, and changes to that skin would leave monobook unaffected. #bodyContent, #content, #footer { font-size:13px; background-color: #99FFFF; background-repeat: repeat; color: Black; } I've changed the color to a shade of blue to be in more in keeping with everything else. If that doesn't work, someone else will have to choose the color. Also I want to see if a bigger font will fix most of the complaints. But definitely put it in Sapphire and not Common. --Kirk 22:34, July 11, 2010 (UTC) OK I've added this to that style sheet. This was a new document for this as no pre-existing style sheet for that named style existed -I assume because it was using the default. Let me know if that works. Eric Hunting 03:39, July 12, 2010 (UTC) Marshall T. Savage? Is Mr. Savage involved at all in this wiki or any other TMP related projects? Is there a way to contact or correspond with him? Also, is anyone on this site actually involved in real-world experiments or projects relating to TMP? Is it all just conceptual design, or is anything actually being built? I ask because I can't simply sit on my hands while such an amazingly complex and beautiful project goes unfinished. I personally plan to take a completed proposal for an Aquarius Colony to someone richer than me within this decade, but I don't want to step on anyone's toes. Any information you have on actual proposals to interested parties, or large-scale attempts at fund-raising would be useful. Thanks, Greentiger 18:48, September 12, 2010 (UTC) Thanks for the message Greentiger. Mr. Savage is not involved in the TMP2 project or with any other TMP-related projects currently being developed by the Living Universe Foundation. (formerly the First Millennial Foundation - FMF) For personal reasons that have never been fully disclosed to us, Marshal Savage decided to retire from his career as a futurist writer and space advocate, resigning from the original FMF organization and returning to a private life at his home in Colorado. He asked that his privacy be respected and no one has heard from him in public since. I have no contact information for him myself and have never been contacted by him, though I have been told by some of his older closer contacts that he approves of this project. After Savage left, the original FMF went into decline and changed its name to the LUF as part of an application for NPO status. However, a chronic lack of motivation and decisiveness among the first generation of core organizers led to continued slow decline, slowing of activity, and dwindling of members. Some years ago I began the TMP2 project as a way to revive the organization and to revise, update, and elaborate the original TMP to contemporary technology and futurist theory. Over time all futurist plans -especially ones intended to span a great distance into the future- age and various aspects of them become anachronistic as new ideas and technology appear and so they must be updated periodically. All functional project plans must be living, evolving, ones because the conditions in which they must be executed always change. Having done the most logistics analysis of TMP of anyone in the organization, I chose to take this on myself rather than let the now LUF disappear, and thus the TMP2 project was born. I have been it's primary writer for several years. A new Aquarius plan was, in fact, the key catalyst of this project. I realized long ago that a key stumbling block to progress for TMP was the original design of Aquarius, which was was the product of Savage's limited knowledge of marine architecture and the influence of the eccentric and mercurial Dr. Wolf Hilbertz, the inventor of the electrolytic sea accretion technique. Based on a static float fixed moored platform system, the original Aquarius design required the pre-deployment of a vast breakwater ring structure at least as large in surface area as the main habitable settlement structure itself. Unable to produce this on the open sea itself, Aquarius would need to pre-fabricate modular components for it at numerous at-shore facilities, each with an appropriate lagoon to 'culture' these large modular elements. Thus Savage devised the Aquarius Rising stage of coastal eco-village development as a preliminary step to the construction of Aquarius. And this is where the logistics of the plan break down because, due to the nature of coastal real estate development in the western industrial nations, these kinds of locations are now very rare and very expensive real estate. We would be in competition with giant resort corporations for property costing millions of dollars per acre. Where this kind of property is more common and less expensive, it is so remote few of the predominately middle-class western membership of the FMF would have any hope to visit, let alone live there. To make matters worse, the Hilbertz process was proving to be a fraud, Hilbertz having grossly exaggerated the characteristics of this process in his patent documentation and promotional media. To date, no one ha ever produced a sea accretion structure more than a half-inch thick. It's my suspicion that the realization of these problems might have partly influenced Savage's choice to leave the organization as it was shortly after a fruitless trip to Hawaii in search of Aquarius Rising building sites that he decided to leave. What Savage didn't know at the time was that such simple float platform technology was already largely obsolete for open sea structures. Today, the most likely form of technology for this kind of construction is the Pneumatically Stabilized Platform developed by Float Inc. of California. PSPs are active wave attenuating structures using a cellular modular design that can consume all wave energy of wavelength shorter than a platform's cross-section profile. So they function like their own breakwater, allowing ships to dock against them right on the open sea along their leeward sides. They also do not use fixed mooring. Beyond a certain depth, fixed mooring of a platform becomes more expensive than active station-keeping using electric azimuth thrusters -the power for these coming from the platform itself as it collects the wave energy it attenuates using small turbines in the linking air-ducts between platform module cells. PSPs can be made with a large variety of materials, the engineering adjusted accordingly. This allows one to use conventional concrete or more advanced materials like geopolymers whose raw materials may be sourced from the sea by farming algae/cyanobacteria. What all this means is that building Aquarius today no longer requires an Aquarius Rising stage. We can incrementally grow an Aquarius settlement from a small near-shore community -a floating eco-village- to the full size open-sea marine settlement moving it whole little by little as its population affords longer range transportation with larger economies of scale. Make no mistake, this is still a big project to get started even if we have figured out how to do it much more easily than originally thought. People seem to generally have a strange attitude about the proposition of a marine settlement despite the fact that houseboat communities have been in existence for almost as long as we've been seafaring. There are floating condominium complexes even in places like NJ today, yet people still act like this is a fanciful and impossible SciFi notion because they are so ignorant of the broad variety of architecture and communities actually existing in the world. We have also had a great deal of trouble getting people to understand the important relationship between marine development and space development and at one time this produced a great -and to a degree still persistent- rift in the organization. (and that may be one of the other key reasons Savage left) Any concerted effort to expand space transit is largely compelled to the sea as we have used up most coastal real estate. This is why the Sea Launch program exists. And the sea, through OTEC, is critical in supplying renewable energy for such an expansion. It is our single-largest reserve of solar thermal potential. The primary logistical purpose of Aquarius was, in fact, to be the power plant for Bifrost. Should we ultimately develop a practical Space Elevator technology, the sea is where is has to go and an Aquarius settlement it's logical downstation and power plant. There are no free lunches in physics. No matter how you go about it, getting to orbit has about the same large cost in energy and any great expansion of space development must be accompanied by an expansion in renewable energy as we have no other source of energy clean and large enough. Had NASA ever flown the Shuttle as frequently as they once predicted they would, they would have become the largest energy consumer in Florida, if not the whole US, and there would have been endless fighting over locating nuclear power plants in a hurricane zone! But people still have a strong tendency to consider marine development as some kind of distraction or side-line to the main objective of launching rockets and throwing people into orbit. Currently, the TMP2 project is the main 'real world' project of the LUF and is intended to produce a new book in a different style than the original. (much more visual in the approach to depicting the plan and much more focused on depicting it in terms of lifestyles in its different settlements than the more classic space futurist books)This more visual approach is proving important as western culture has become a less literate culture where most people will not read anything longer than a 'tweet'. But illustration talent has so far proven elusive as so few artists today have an interest in space or science. In addition to this is the Utilihab project, also spearheaded by myself. Utilihab is an open source modular home-building system I have been developing which is derived from the use of larger scale off-the-shelf aluminum T-slot profile framing systems and is similar in nature to such systems as the Tomahouse, Jeriko House, and IT-house building systems but without proprietary technology and designs. It is intended for use with the first generation of architecture for 'seed' Aquarius settlements based on simple ferro-cement platforms in sheltered water locations. It will later evolve into the 'in-fill' building system for larger marine settlement structures using concrete/geopolymer superstructures and may eventually evolve into the basis of in-fill systems for use in space. It is also intended to become the first industry for the LUF and foundation of the Greenstar Industrial Coop as outlined in the new Foundation phase plans. I have drafted the initial parts 'catalog' for this building system and am working on where to present it on-line and on building its first test/demonstration structures. Another current project is the International Open Space Initiative. This is an attempt to jump-start the Avalon phase of development through an open space program based on the premise of telerobotic pre-settlement of the Moon and Mars. The basic idea is to base an open source technology space program using a Linux development model on telerobotics as a means to enable open international participation. Manned space activity has proven ineffective at establishing a critical cultural relevance for space development because participation is so very restricted. It's not enough anymore for the public to be a fan club cheering from outside the space center fence. If they can't participate, it's irrelevant. Few people right now have any hope of becoming an astronaut, working for NASA, or being able to afford a space tourism jaunt. But a great many people can and do build robots as a hobby and the level of sophistication in this today is really not that far removed from that of the space programs themselves. (because their compulsion to focus on manned space made them very-late-comers to the venue of space robotics) So we have this great situation where, if you can establish a true open world space program based on telerobotics, even a poor but smart kid in Mumbai with access to the internet, some basic electronics and computing skills, and some clever ideas has just as much of a chance to see his brainchildren get to space as any millionaire space entrepreneur. It's a completely open field of development with very direct dividends for terrestrial progress. I liken telerobotic pre-settlement to The Best Model Train Ever -the kind you might one day move into. Right now I am developing a presentation for this program but am struggling, again, to find illustrators for it. I have had interest in this concept from the OWL TV network -who is interested in the possibility of a reality TV/documentary series on program participants-, but they are waiting for me to get this to a critical mass. This will require a good and portable presentation package and I am working on video/powerpoint presentation, portable exhibits, and possible scale model mock-ups of telerobotic outposts. Most recently, other LUF members have begun working on a Sea Probe project which is intended to deploy a science lab to the Atlantic Gyre to prospect its waste materials content as the possible basis of a settlement based on recycling that material. This parallels another independent project being pursued today that was inspired by a proposal I made several years ago to clean the Pacific Gyre by prospecting and gathering its recyclable plastics for use in constructing a marine facility. So this is about where we are today. There is much to do and not a lot of resources as we are still rebuilding after the long decline of the organization over the past decade. I welcome any suggestions you may have for these various projects and would be interested to learn what you have planned in parallel. I tend to be of the opinion that fundraising potential is very much keyed to the volume and production value of presentation media, and this has long proven a tough nut for us to crack with so few media artists in the field of science/technical illustration/design today. If you have additional questions please feel free to write to TheMillennialProject 'at' gmail.com. --Eric Hunting 16:52, September 13, 2010 (UTC) Abbreviations I had to look up what SSTO and SWATH mean, and I'm unsure about VAB. I'm going to see about linking abbreviations to said page, but in the meantime keep an eye on things that'll make newbies go "Huh?". AlgaeNymph 13:07, September 29, 2010 (UTC) If memory serves, Jamal made an acronym index for the site earlier. VAB is Vehicle Assembly Building. Commonly used term in the space industry and well known to Floridians as the Kennedy Space Center VAB is the tallest building in that state. --Eric Hunting 15:06, September 30, 2010 (UTC) TomaTech and other corporations Specific building companies and propritary goods are mentioned throughout the site but not much elaborated on. Do you think we should create summary pages for them or should I just link to the corporate promotional sites? AlgaeNymph 14:48, September 30, 2010 (UTC) Links to the corporate sites may be sufficient, though I haven't been adding them in as yet because companies are getting sensitive about who links to their web sites these days. We had problems with this from Dr. Wolf Hilbertz' acolytes in the past, who sent us all sorts of threats because their computer-illiterate staff got it into their heads that just because we mentioned Hilbetz in some articles, and those articles were older than their more recent web sites and turned up higher ranking than theirs on Google searches, we were committing some kind of fraud. With these kinds of people in the world, it's better to not even bother giving anyone link exposure. Some of the companies I've mentioned in the past have also recently become uncertain in status. TomaTech/Tomahouses has apparently not shipped product for a couple years and Jeriko House is no longer responding to contacts. Their president hasn't contacted me in over a year. Perhaps victims of the global recession and real estate melt-down. Eric Hunting 15:23, September 30, 2010 (UTC) hi hope to have the list of space advocacy groups done by sunday Mr. Hunting, I left you a message on the Utilihab wiki, but this seems to be a more appropriate place to reach you. Without repeating my message on your talk page there, I can say that I'm extremely excited to have stumbled upon your (and others) work. I reached many of the conclusions espoused by the Millenial Project, the Lifeboat Foundation, the Seasteading Institute and the Living Universe Foundation without having been exposed to them before. In some ways, then, seeing my own thoughts mirrored by others is both elating and disappointing: I'm glad that my ideas have been lent credibility through independent convergance but also a little bit sad that all the ideas I thought were innovative are not very original at all. In any case: I am currently working to produce concrete (figuratively and literally,) self-sufficient, and horizontally scalable semi-permanent deep ocean platforms in order to host an economy geared towards astronautical enterprise and the ultimate goal of space colonization. I am studying Ocean Engineering and am on track to have a viable platform capable of supporting at least 150 people within 10 years. If you have the time, I would love to start a dialogue. You can reach me at my personal email address, sneurlax@gmail.com, or my military email address, m150276@usna.edu. Very respectfully, Joshua Babb